"Man, I can't believe this. Another basement. Another elevator. How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?"

"We got a new SOP for DOAs from the FAA." -John McClane, Die Hard 2

by Vincent Suarez Everything you need to know about Die Hard 2 can be gleaned from these two lines. In essentially replicating the formula perfected by its predecessor, Die Hard 2 doesn't merely lapse into the self-parody that characterizes (and often weakens) most sequels--it embraces (and is frequently elevated) by it. With a higher body count, quicker pace, and slightly shorter running time than Die Hard, the entire exercise smacks of shorthand, resulting in a breezier, if less substantial and sophisticated, experience. Nonetheless, like John McClane himself, the film packs a smart-alecky wallop.

by Walter Chaw As easy as it is to dismiss Sylvester Stallone as your everyday, run-of-the-mill swinging dick, another in the pantheon of Eighties-into-Nineties box-office meatsticks assembled anew by Sly in his Expendables franchise, it becomes clear in retrospect that Stallone has his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist in his most personal projects, if not always in his contract jobs. Although an obvious and atrocious failure whose Stallone-authored screenplay, the end-product of a series of rewrites Stallone took it upon himself to inflict on Beverly Hills Cop, Cobra manages still to deliver a few smart genre mash-up moments, a few topical reflections of late-'80s crime-wave paranoia. Sandwiched in there right between his second and third Rambo films and fourth and fifth Rockys, Cobra is the kind of vanity piece that appears now and again in Stallone's repertoire to distract attention away from all the other stuff that only looks like a vanity project. Stallone is sneaky in a very particular way. As a sociologist, intentional or not, he is absolutely brilliant, and just on the strength of his Rocky and Rambo pictures, he's managed as good a diary of the fears and hopes of the last twenty years as any other body of work from any other single artist. He's the Bruce Springsteen of popular cinema. Bruce produced a lot of crap, too.

by Walter Chaw The danger is getting lost in fantasy, of being consumed by the lunar flame of lamplight filtered through celluloid. And the irony is that directors, the good ones, are already lost and have been for years. There have been pictures about an all-devouring cinephilia before (Cinema Paradiso, say, or 8½), and now a pair of films by two directors at opposite ends of their careers--Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers and Aaron Woodley's 2003 TIFF Discovery Award-winner Rhinoceros Eyes--strive to blur the line between movies and reality in twin tales of sexual maturation, of coming of age in a movie house--of, to parse The Judybats, learning how to kiss watching James Dean movies. Fascinatingly, the two films share Michael Pitt, forging a path for himself as the archon for the modern dreamer raised on lethal doses of popular culture, and weaning himself from that luxuriant udder only with great difficulty.

by Walter Chaw In the "careful what you wish for" sweepstakes, here's Kevin Costner, fresh off an Oscar victory for his naïve idyll Dances with Wolves, spending his hard-won Hollywood currency indulging best buddy Kevin Reynolds in a trilogy of pictures (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Rapa Nui, Waterworld) he produced for the express purpose of giving Reynolds more than enough rope. If you're in the sport of charting the positively Greek decline of the late-'80s box-office king, mark 1991 as Exhibit A, as his sad attempt at an English accent for Robin of Loxley was notoriously overdubbed in post-production after being deemed the stuff of legend in initial cuts. Aside from providing schadenfreudians endless fodder, it was the first real evidence that the Golden Boy's tragic flaw was the belief that his charm was based on something other than Gary Cooper's mantle of Everybody's All-American Doofus.

by Bryant FrazerBreaking the Waves can make you queasy from its opening moments, when director Lars von Trier's name appears with the title superimposed over it, the title card swaying gently on screen as if it were photographed at sea. The effect is less subtle on home video than it is on a big screen, where you're not as aware of the edges of the frame, but the message is the same: suddenly, you're adrift, unmoored, alone.

May 27, 2014

by Walter Chaw The old showbiz maxim of never working with children or animals is one violated with such regularity that I guess the otherwise sensible and talented Jason Alexander could be forgiven for Dunston Checks In. There is, in truth, very little else forgivable about the benighted exercise.

by Jefferson Robbins The urban vigilante is one of cinema's most potent, enduring figures, and it's worth asking how he got there. Michael Winner's influential but derided Death Wish drafts an explicit genealogy for its cosmopolitan avenger, granting him claim to the mantle of the lone lawman of the Old West. Bereaved through violence, Manhattan architect Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) takes an assignment revising a valuable development plan near Tucson. There he pauses to watch a cowboy shootout re-enacted for tourists, the bad guys toppling until the besieged sheriff is the sole, righteous survivor. It's a cheap, thrilling, thoroughly Hollywood portrayal of frontier justice, and it represents an ethos Paul's host Jainchill (Stuart Margolin) urges him to carry in his heart back to New York, where unlicensed firearm possession has been illegal since 1911. This tension isn't original to Wendell Mayes's relatively terse screenplay--it originates in Brian Garfield's 1972 source novel, published after the author spent a decade cranking out pulp western yarns. But Death Wish uses this element to make its own statement, grafting the mediated concept of frontier self-justification onto an urban morality play. The western may be dead, and it may have been a lie to begin with (and it may be the cinema of the '70s that killed it), but Death Wish is among the genre's inheritors. Don't all children eventually hope to supersede their parents?

by Walter Chaw Mid-career, Sergei Eisenstein wrote a book-length study of film form. He did it with humour and a Coleridge-ian wistfulness. He writes that, once he's finished with this book, he'll try some of the things he's talking about in it. Among them is an idea that, what if instead of using montage (which he calls "vulgar"), someone were to evoke the idea of "murder" just by showing ten sequences, not otherwise linked by linear exposition, that separately evoke murder? In more ways than this, but in this particular way, Steven Spielberg is the prodigal. He evoked "war" in twenty impossibly harrowing minutes to open Saving Private Ryan; he evoked "Holocaust" in a similar stretch in the middle of Schindler's List; he evokes "slavery" in an absolutely tremendous, wordless chunk about halfway through Amistad; and he sandwiches all of it in patronizing, ham-handed treacle, massively, criminally over-scored by chief enabler/collaborator John Williams.

ANYTHING BUT LOVE: VOLUME ONE Image C Sound B Extras D "Fear of Flying," "Deadline," "Burning the Toad (The Jack Story)," "Love and Death," "Dorothy Dearest," "This is Not a Date," "Ch-Ch-Changes," "Those Lips, Those Thais," "It's My Party and I'll Schvitz If I Want To," "Scared Straight," "Mr. Mom," "Just the Facts, Ma'am," "Bang, You're Dead," "Truth or Consequences," "It's Better to Have Loved and Flossed," "Hearts and Bones," "Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," "Breast of Friends," "Hotel of the Damned," "All About Allison," "Proof It All Night," "Three Men on a Match," "Partying is Such Sweet Sorrow," "The Ice Woman Cometh," "Hooray for Hollywood," "Robin Q. Public," "The Days of Whine and Haroses," "Thirty... Something"

by Ian Pugh Equal parts hilarious and repellent, "Tom Goes to the Mayor" boasts an intentionally ugly aesthetic typified by characters who consist of static, colour-drained photographs of their performers sent through Photoshop's "photocopy" function, their "animation" being the occasional change in pictures to depict a new facial expression. Frequently interrupting are live-action interstitials, usually mock commercials for restaurants or gift shops from a local cable network full of blurry star-wipes and awkwardly-superimposed titles. The show's devotion to these stylistic grotesqueries is not burdened by complex plots, its basic formula boiling down to the title itself: naïve doormat Tom Peters (co-creator Tim Heidecker) comes up with an idea to improve the tiny community of Jefferton only to be blamed for the disasters that occur when he submits his plans to the indifferent, self-absorbed mayor (co-creator Eric Wareheim). Of course, Tom's ideas are routinely terrible on their own (as evidenced by the moronic T-shirt slogans (1.5, "Rats Off to Ya!") and non-functioning toy calculators (1.9, "Calcucorn")), a fact which completes a trinity of exploration into an arena right alongside Saturday morning cartoons (recalling cheapo anti-animation fare like "Clutch Cargo" and "The Marvel Superheroes") and public-access television, where quality control is impertinent. Between Jefferton's overload of obnoxious tchotchkes and its smorgasbord of disgusting food platters, "Tom Goes to the Mayor" is uniformly disturbing and sometimes nauseating. In other words, it succeeds spectacularly.

by Bill Chambers The partnership of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin yielded a giant box office hit last time out with their alien invasion picture Independence Day, a film critically dissed in large part because it was populated with stereotypes: we knew who the smart guy was because he wore glasses and a pocket-protector; who the gay guy was because Harvey Fierstein's dialogue was set to flaming; who the hero was because he promised to "whoop E.T.'s ass." This time out, Devlin and Emmerich have solved that problem by making no attempts whatsoever to define their stable of characters. Not only is New York City a shambles when Godzilla is through, so is Godzilla, a disaster-picture in every sense of the word. This may be the most uncompelling summer movie contender in the history of the sport.

by Walter Chaw The more cynical among us would note that the title might also refer to the time that movies exactly like Taking Lives have stolen from hapless audiences, but the fact of it is that if not for our mortal curiosity, we might have missed genuinely good mad-dog killer flicks like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Manhunter, The Untold Story, and Se7en. On a reptile level, I think it behoves the herd to slow down at the scene of a gory end, the flock imprinting another's messy mortal lesson as an explanation for our fascination with train wrecks and splatter flicks. But where a film like The Silence of the Lambs perversely reassures its captive audience that no matter the procreative ingenuity of a predator's unslakeable bloodlust, there's always a corn-fed, buttermilk-scrubbed farm girl there to put him away (and Taking Lives falls into this camp), there are films like granddaddy In Cold Blood (and great-grandpappy Psycho) that disdain the easy treatment of societal cancers. The one is appeasement and equivocation-bordering-on-exploitation, the other is always disquieting and sometimes even thought-provoking.

by Walter Chaw Steve Kloves's follow-up to his exceptional The Fabulous Baker Boys is Flesh and Bone, a dark-hued journey through the Southern Gothic that represents career pinnacles for Meg Ryan and (until The Royal Tenenbaums) Gwyneth Paltrow. That Flesh and Bone--a doom-filled piece that glowers with malevolence from its horrifying opening sequence to its unsettling conclusion--never received a great deal of attention upon its initial release isn't as much of a surprise as the fact that not even the passage of time has cemented it as a minor classic. There are few pictures more deserving of critical revisionism.

by Walter Chaw Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II is among the best American films of the 1980s. It's audacious and ingenious, the kind of movie people describe as having been made by the seat of one's pants--the kind of movie that's doomed to be underestimated because its genre is disreputable and its sensibilities are too cartoonish. Indeed, the energy in Raimi's early, best work is akin to Tex Avery and Three Stooges, but he controls it, wields it; the anti-David O. Russell. Only in Crimewave does he overuse that muscle. In Evil Dead II, the humour is low, there is absolutely no shame, and in a real way, the picture encapsulates what was delirious and sloppy about '80s blockbuster cinema. It's a thing of beauty, exaggerated pathos, and Wagnerian derring-do. Raimi followed it in 1990 with what's essentially a rebuttal to Tim Burton's Batman, the "biggest movie of the moment" from the year before. Batman was the first salvo in a barrage of prestige "pulp" entertainments that presented the Comic Book as "A" material; Raimi drags it back into "B," at least for a little while. His movies are EC and off-Code and Bernie Wrightson and Jack Davis and Al Williamson, while Burton's are German Expressionism and sad, sometimes inscrutably solipsistic tales of Oyster Boys. Raimi, in 1990, made the best comic-book movie there ever was, a title only challenged by Raimi's own Spider-Man 2: Darkman.

April 17, 2014

by Bill Chambers I might be apocryphally attributing this to Pauline Kael, but I'm fairly confident that it was she who said there's no such thing as bad acting, only bad casting. When people hear that John McNaughton's Normal Life stars Luke Perry and Ashley Judd, they tend to lose interest, but to quote another of my favourite critics, Alex Jackson, "a great performance incorporates and molds a persona. It deals with it. Their body, voice, and persona are inescapable facts [and] the greatness of a performance lies in nothing more [than] the acknowledgment of these facts." It's interesting that the contemporary actors most likely to be credited with soul-searching to find the emotional truths of a character--Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, even Mark Ruffalo--are heirs apparent to Lon Chaney, gradually transforming themselves from without. In the same piece quoted above, a review of Midnight Express published just prior to last year's Academy Awards, Jackson says he values Christina Ricci's work in Monster over that of her co-star Charlize Theron: Where Ricci plumbs the depths of her established screen persona, Theron's aesthetically-assisted turn is so anomalous in terms of her career as to register as standoffish. "I suspect that it takes more courage to be an icon than an actor," Jackson brilliantly surmises.

by Alex Jackson 1982's The Slumber Party Massacre isn't a film so much as a work of film criticism. It was produced and directed by Amy Holden Jones, perhaps better known today as the screenwriter of Mystic Pizza and Indecent Proposal, and written by established Lesbian Feminist poet and author Rita Mae Brown, who is perhaps best known for the 1973 book Rubyfruit Jungle, typically considered one the earliest coming-of-age lesbian novels.